11:30 A.M.

The promotional literature that came with “Orchid and the Wasp,” a début novel by Caoilinn Hughes, cited the book as this year’s “Conversations with Friends,” a reference to the lucent critical favorite by Sally Rooney. Both are works of realist fiction by Irish women, set (partly) in an Ireland enervated by the economic crash, that explore contemporary modes of communication (texts, irony). And both move swiftly, coolly, and flowingly; they pursue effortlessness.

But “Orchid and the Wasp,” unlike “Conversations with Friends,” is hyper-focussed on a single character. Its protagonist, Gael Foess, is a ruthless, fast-thinking beauty who might have read as aspirational in a James Bond story but does not, here. (“Despicable,” one reviewer called her.) We are meant to appreciate Gael’s murderous intelligence, even as we wonder about her score on the Levenson Psychopathy Scale. Gael grows up with her father, a harsh banker; her mother, a quietly magnetic orchestra conductor; and her ethereal brother Guthrie, who believes that he suffers from epilepsy but is in fact afflicted with psychogenic seizures. The book follows her from childhood, through university in London (she cheats), and into New York, where her life entwines with the Occupy Wall Street movement despite her sympathy for the one per cent.

Gael can be more cuddly than she seems—her devotion to Guthrie manifests in a plot to steal, forge, and sell copies of his paintings to the Manhattan artistic élite—and Hughes, a poet, touches the prose with a comic wand. (One character represents “the entire world market for designer dungarees.”) “Orchid and the Wasp” delivers a fantasy of competence, the kind that is in dialogue, if not always complete agreement, with morality. Hughes, describing Gael during a high-stakes negotiation, writes, “A multitude of sentences occur to her all at once like ropes swinging and she calculates which one to take, knowing she’ll have to climb it, hand-over-hand.” These exertions, in which the dopamine thrill of risk meets the gritted effort of survival, are easy enough to divorce from the book’s sometimes murky ideas, offering the bodily remove of an episode of “American Ninja Warrior.”

August 8, 2018

Of all the billions of pages that make up the Internet, one of my very favorites contains “No Reservations: Narnia,” a work of fan fiction, from 2010, by Edonohana, a pseudonym of the young-adult and fantasy author Rachel Manija Brown. The story is exactly what it sounds like: a pastiche of Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Channelling the casual charisma of Bourdain’s first-person writing, Brown finds him visiting the stick-wattled burrow of sentient moles, where he dines on pavender (a saltwater fish of Lewis’s invention) and is drunk under the table by a talking mouse. He slurps down eel stew and contemplates the void with mud-dwelling depressives. Later, he bails on an appointment at Cair Paravel, the royal seat of Narnia, to bloody his teeth at a secretive werewolf feast.

The real Bourdain died almost two months ago, at the age of sixty-one, of an apparent suicide. Many of us who were fortunate to know him have been left sifting through our records, pulling out bits of unfinished conversations. A few months before his death, I had e-mailed him Brown’s homage, after years of wondering if he even knew it existed. The question had occurred to Brown herself: “No Reservations: Narnia” is her most popular piece of fan fiction. (She told me that she suspects it might be her most popular work, period.) When we corresponded, before Bourdain’s death, she said that she sometimes worried that Bourdain had been sent the link dozens of times.

There persists a mistaken belief, outside the world of fan fiction, that it consists of bad writing from floor to ceiling—ham-handed, indulgent, turgidly sexual, and thoroughly amateurish. For a full-throated defense of the genre, see the Harvard English professor Stephanie Burt on the subject. Or just read Brown’s story, which is so well told, so deeply researched, so uncannily on point in its representation of the culture and cuisine of Narnia, and so faithful in its mimicry of Bourdain’s writing voice that it is sure to charm any reader who gives it a chance. Including, as it turns out, Bourdain himself. After I sent him “No Reservations: Narnia,” he replied that, contrary to Brown’s concerns, he’d never come across the story before. “This is astonishingly well written with an attention to detail that’s frankly a bit frightening,” he said in an e-mail. “I’m both flattered and disturbed. I think I need a drink.”

August 6, 2018

Recently, while browsing for something new to read, a book with an unassuming cover and intriguing title caught my eye. It was Anna Seghers’s “The Seventh Cross”—and, as it turns out, the first unabridged English translation of the award-winning 1942 novel. Set in Germany in the course of a week in October, 1936, “The Seventh Cross” follows the heart-pounding escape of seven political prisoners from the fictional concentration camp Westhofen, not far from Mainz and Frankfurt. The Nazi authorities are after these “enemies of law and order,” and the camp’s commandant orders seven plane trees cut down and fashioned into wooden crosses, one for each of the soon-to-be-apprehended men. (“There is no asylum in our country anymore for fugitive criminals,” he declares.) The escapees might seek out their families and friends, but they risk being turned in by unknown Gestapo informers, or, worse, having their loved ones arrested and sent to camps themselves. George Heisler, the novel’s protagonist, finds that all the people in his former life have “been turned into a network of living traps.”

The novel’s narrative shifts from George’s perspective to those of more than thirty characters, including his estranged wife, his fellow-escapees, the Jewish doctor who treats him, ardent Nazis, and closeted Communists—painting a profound and chilling portrait of life under the Third Reich. Seghers depicts the constant dread of the time—“a fear of being persecuted by the state,” which, she writes, “better defines to whom the state belongs than any constitutions or history books.” And she demonstrates how, despite facing mortal danger, some find the courage to do what is moral, even when it isn’t lawful.

Seghers experienced this fear and danger firsthand. She was from a German Jewish family and a member of the Communist Party; she fled to France in 1933, and then to Mexico, in 1940, to escape the country she depicts so vividly. She dedicated “The Seventh Cross” “to Germany’s antifascists, living and dead,” a testament to human resilience and resistance while the horrors of Nazism were still under way.

August 3, 2018

When Chuck Berry died, last year, the obituaries were filled with the neon names of sixties rock and roll mourning Berry’s passing and declaring him the father of the form. But history doesn’t work quite that neatly. Everything comes from multiple sources, forms of music not least. In “Shout, Sister, Shout!,” Gayle F. Wald tells the story of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915–1973), a daughter of the Sanctified Church, a sublime gospel singer, a songwriter, and a hot-guitar player who became known, with good reason, as the Godmother of Rock and Roll. Wald, a professor of English at George Washington University, published her fine biography in 2007, but it—and, more, Tharpe’s music—never quite got the attention it deserved. Wald will give you the story, from small-town Arkansas to the biggest stages in the country. Spotify, YouTube, and all the other obvious sources will give you the music: “Up Above My Head,” “Didn’t It Rain,” “This Train.”

If Tharpe is old news to you, my apologies, but you’ve got to hear her play and sing. Little Richard called Sister Rosetta his favorite singer as a child. Johnny Cash adored her voice. Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Isaac Hayes—they all loved listening to Tharpe and claimed her as an influence. Like Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin, Tharpe lived in the country between the sacred and the profane, the Word of God and the realm of earthly, and earthy, matters. In the late fifties, the early stars of rock started hearing Tharpe sing “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” and it knocked them flat. “Say, man, there’s a woman that can sing some rock and roll. I mean, she’s singing religious music, but she’s singing rock and roll,” Jerry Lee Lewis told Peter Guralnick. “She jumps it . . . I said, ‘Whooo.’ Sister Rosetta Tharpe.”

August 2, 2018

In 1984, Zimbabwe Publishing House released the first English-language edition of Winnie Mandela’s “Part of My Soul,” which documents—in letters, interviews, and testimonies—Mandela’s fight against apartheid South Africa. The Z.P.H. edition was sold only in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Angola; that I found my copy at a rare-and-used-book store, on the Upper West Side, mirrors the spread of information that exposed apartheid itself. In 1976, the World, a Bantu newspaper, published a photo of Antoinette Sithole running beside a young man carrying her twelve-year-old brother, Hector Pieterson, who had been fatally shot in the back by police during the Soweto uprising, in Johannesburg. The image was picked up by international press and spread like dye in water. Suddenly, the world was aware of apartheid.

Mandela’s book only deepens our knowledge of the era. If she wasn’t at the center of an incident, she watched. In June, 1976, twenty thousand children marched on Johannesburg to protest Afrikaans being used as the language of instruction in black secondary schools. “The children picked up stones,” Mandela writes, “and marched toward machine guns.” She later organized donations for the mass burials of those who were killed. Her prose is matter-of-fact and, at times, sardonic. We learn that her activism meant a life of isolation. She was long apart from her husband, Nelson, who spent most of their marriage imprisoned, and she was forced to send her daughters to school in Swaziland. She also survived incessant and violent encounters with the police. One day, during apartheid, a sergeant barged into her home, found her dressing in her bedroom, and touched her and whispered in her ear. She grabbed him and threw him on the floor, “which is what he deserved.” She was charged and imprisoned for resisting arrest.

Mandela died in April, at the age of eighty-one. The obituaries tended to stress salacious details, the accusations of adultery and murder. “Part of My Soul” is a vociferous, moving corrective to such coverage: a firsthand account of Mandela’s strength in the face of abuse, and an enduring tribute to a beacon of the anti-apartheid movement.

July 23, 2018

Philosophers aren’t known for being fun. This might be because the kind of person who sits down to systemize the universe doesn’t have time for jokes, but it might also have something to do with a long-standing feud. Since the dawn of Western philosophy, it seems, those who expound a love for knowledge have nursed a hostility toward laughter. Plato began sullying its name around 380 B.C., when he said that laughing was intellectually untidy—a way to lose oneself in messy emotion. Epictetus, a Greek Stoic, found joking irresponsible, and was rumored never to have laughed at all. Laughing, for these thinkers, was a distraction from worthy topics like tragedy and god. Jokes were silly and philosophy was not.

Recently, I picked up “Serious Larks,” a collection of essays, by the philosopher Ted Cohen, that can be seen as a corrective to that binary. Cohen wades into the ontologically uncharted waters of fun stuff—jokes, metaphors, sports. “Is knowledge,” he asks, “the only, or even the most important, concern? . . . Is a joke less important than a theorem even if it’s a good joke and a trivial theorem?”

It’s a good question. What I find so charming about Cohen’s style is his unyielding appreciation for ordinary life—his sense that humanity has just as much to do with the mundane as it does with matters of great aesthetic importance. In one essay, “Sports and Art,” Cohen wonders whether the distinctly human ability to become a sports fan comes from the same source as the distinctly human ability to act altruistically. Is becoming a sports fan an intrinsically moral act? He asks the reader to “ponder the lot of the true fan,” which allows one “to think freely about the phenomenon of fellow feeling, unencumbered by whatever moral theories you already subscribe to, and without the pressure that comes with the consideration of official cases of moral gravity.” No conclusion may be reached, but such thoughts, Cohen argues, could be “very refreshing.” The same could be said of his essays.

July 17, 2018

A couple of months ago, I met a fiction writer I admire immensely, and we somehow got to talking about E. L. Konigsburg’s best—if not best-known—novel, “The View from Saturday.” Konigsburg’s 1996 book, which won the Newbery Medal, is a novel I find myself talking about oddly often: it’s mysterious and rewarding, less an exemplary children’s novel than a perfect novel, full stop. The book opens and closes within a single day, with a paraplegic teacher, named Mrs. Olinski, taking four sixth-grade students—Noah, Nadia, Ethan, and Julian—to compete in an academic bowl. As the students answer questions, the story doubles back on itself, and their lives start intertwining in retrospect, lacing together a turtle migration in South Florida, a school production of “Annie,” a senior-citizen wedding, and a tea party, at which the students begin to discover that affection and intelligence reinforce each other when shared between friends.

Last week, I reread the book, and my appreciation only intensified. It’s stranger and more spacious than I remembered, and subtler, even as the language is plain and bright. A children’s book like this is a tutorial on the pleasures of crisp, economical writing. “The View from Saturday” has a nested, complicated structure, but Konigsburg writes with such limpidity that reading the novel feels like slowly submerging yourself in a cool, clear pool. A charming formality unites the five different narrative voices, and Konigsburg’s stylistic grace notes are a delight. At one point, she compares Nadia to a Raphaelite cherub, red-headed and freckled, though “Raphael probably would have painted out the freckles, and that would have been a mistake. Like brushing the cinnamon off cinnamon toast.” There are hints of magic in the book: Julian, a Sikh newcomer raised on cruise ships, likes to do card tricks, and certain details hang in the air with riddle logic. But “The View from Saturday” is itself a quiet, wonderful act of literary transfiguration, turning scattered pieces into an unbroken whole.

July 16, 2018

This past February, when I picked up “There Are No Dead Here: A Story of Murder and Denial in Colombia,” by Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, I was expecting a dry read. The work is based on the six years that McFarland worked for Human Rights Watch in Colombia, so the best I could hope for, it seemed, was an important, if perhaps bureaucratic, report on my country. Instead, I found a moving, intimate story of three men—a human-rights activist, a prosecutor, and a journalist—who labored for years to expose a terrible truth: how politicians and service members, seeking profit or power, had colluded with far-right paramilitary armies that massacred civilians.

The book begins with the activist, Jesús María Valle, who in the mid-nineties accused the army and Álvaro Uribe—then a governor, now a senator, and the President from 2002 to 2010—of such collusion. Valle, aware that his allegations would be ignored, kept detailed reports, “creating a paper trail showing that the authorities were on notice of the bloodshed.” In 1998, two sicarios killed Valle in front of his sister, who “couldn’t tear her eyes away from Valle’s face as one of the men put the gun to her brother’s head.” Valle’s notes survived him, and they still haunt Colombia’s political landscape, twenty years later. In May, the Supreme Court declared his murder a “crime against humanity.” The prosecutor and the journalist, meanwhile, have spent years amplifying Valle’s evidence, despite multiple death threats meant to silence them. Uribe, the former President, still denies their accusations.

“There Are No Dead Here” is a paradoxical title for a book in which I recorded, in the margins, at least forty-nine murders. The phrase is borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” in which one man, José Arcadio Segundo, is a witness to the state-sponsored murder of three thousand union workers. He is doomed to solitude when no one, not even his brother, will believe him. “The official version,” Márquez wrote, was finally accepted: “There were no dead.”

June 20, 2018

Morten Strøksnes’s book “Shark Drunk,” from 2015, which was translated into English, by Tiina Nunnally, in 2017, has won a clutch of awards in his native Norway, but I’m still waiting for its acceptance into the pantheon of all-time great subtitles—surely “The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean” deserves a nod. As that title suggests, the book follows Strøksnes’s attempt, with his friend, the painter Hugo Aasjord, to capture a Greenland shark, one of the largest and least understood animals in the sea. The reasons why a writer and his artist-fisherman pal spent a year pursuing a creature that few people have seen alive are perhaps self-evident (much like the Melville and Hemingway references I’m straining to avoid), and Strøksnes wisely skips such navel-gazing. Instead, he focusses on the scientific and social histories that inform his quest, turning this story of mostly fruitless fishing trips into an intellectual page-turner.

Strøksnes’s memoir is buoyed by three fascinating subjects: Aasjord, the Greenland shark, and the North Atlantic itself. Aasjord is an eccentric who lives in an abandoned fishing outpost and makes grim, abstract paintings with homemade fish-oil paint. His seafaring know-how propels much of the action. The shark is a monster with eye-eating parasites and urea-poisoned flesh; it can grow up to three thousand pounds and live for five hundred years. But it’s the ocean that earns Strøksnes’s greatest admiration. His tale is peppered with asides detailing the process of whale decomposition, the effects of pollution and seismic blasting on fisheries, and so on. He’s especially interested in the various Renaissance explorers who mapped the Scandinavian waters, from whom he’s inherited a reverence for legend and a penchant for lengthy titles; he approvingly cites Olaus Magnus’s twenty-two-volume history of the region, published, in 1555, under a hundred-word title that ends with the phrase “Meant to Leave the Reader in Delighted Mind.” Strøksnes’s slimmer book manages to do just that, showing how historical and scientific writing can be woven into a narrative while leaving the particular pleasures of both modes intact.

June 18, 2018

I am far from the first critic to recommend Tara Westover’s astounding memoir, “Educated,” but if its comet tail of glowing reviews has not yet convinced you, let me see what I can do. Westover was born sometime in September, 1986—no birth certificate was issued—on a remote mountain in Idaho, the seventh child of Mormon survivalist parents who subscribed to a paranoid patchwork of beliefs well outside the mandates of their religion. The government was always about to invade; the End of Days was always at hand. Westover’s mother worked as a midwife and an herbal healer. Her father, who claimed prophetic powers, owned a scrap yard, where his children labored without the benefit of protective equipment. (Westover recounts accidents so hideous, and so frequent, that it’s a wonder she lived to tell her tale at all.) Mainstream medicine was mistrusted, as were schools, which meant that Westover’s determination to leave home and get a formal education—the choice that drives her book, and changed her life—amounted to a rebellion against her parents’ world.

This story, remarkable as it is, might be merely another entry in the subgenre of extreme American life, were it not for the uncommon perceptiveness of the person telling it. Westover examines her childhood with unsparing clarity, and, more startlingly, with curiosity and love, even for those who have seriously failed or wronged her. In part, this is a book about being a stranger in a strange land; Westover, adrift at university, can’t help but miss her mountain home. But her deeper subject is memory. Westover is careful to note the discrepancies between her own recollections and those of her relatives. (The ones who still speak to her, anyway. Her parents cut her off long ago.) “Part of me will always believe that my father’s words ought to be my own,” she writes. If her book is an act of defiance, a way to set the record of her own life straight, it’s also an attempt to understand, even to respect, those whom she had to break away from in order to get free.

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